Losing NASA's Eyes in the Sky

John McQuaid
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NASA Goddard/MODIS Rapid Response Team, Jeff Schmaltz

Bit by bit, the United States is going blind. The problem, as outlined by the National Research Council, is that thanks to budget cuts and bureaucratic drift, our entire network of scientific observation satellites has begun a rapid and seemingly inevitable decline:

The nation’s Earth observing capability from space is beginning to wane as older missions fail and are not replaced with sufficient cadence to prevent an overall net decline. The committee found that the number of NASA and NOAA Earth observing instruments in space is likely to decline to as little as 25 percent of the current number by 2020. This precipitous decline in the quantity of Earth science and applications observations from space undertaken by the United States reinforces the conclusion in the decadal survey and its predecessor, the 2005 interim report (NRC, 2005), which declared that the U.S. system of environmental satellites is at risk of collapse. The committee found that a rapid decline in capability is now beginning.

If things continue down this path, the decline will result in a steady loss of crucial scientific data during a time when, given the range of hard-to-predict effects from a warming atmosphere, it will be needed more than ever.
And while you'd expect most of the fallout from such problems to hit the scientific establishment, it may also have broader effects, including on the first thing most of us pay attention to in the morning, weather forecasting:

The projected loss of observing capability could have significant adverse consequences for science and society. The loss of observations of key Earth system components and processes will weaken the ability to understand and forecast changes arising from interactions and feedbacks within the Earth system and limit the data and information available to users and decision makers. Consequences are likely to include slowing or even reversal of the steady gains in weather forecast accuracy over many years and degradation of the ability to assess and respond to natural hazards and to measure and understand changes in Earth’s climate and life support systems. The decrease in capability by 2020 will also have far-reaching consequences for the vigor and breadth of the nation’s space-observing industrial and academic base, endangering the pipeline of Earth science and aerospace engineering students and the health of the future workforce.

Of course, we live in a time of austerity. But these are not big-ticket programs. The NRC says together, these satellites should cost $2 billion per year, less than dozens of tertiary Defense Department tech programs, or the cost of one super-secret giant NSA data-processing center.